Whatever air travel used to imply – adventure, romance, discovery, etc – it’s recently become a largely agricultural experience, where passengers are treated like semi-valuable-but-troublesome livestock.

On this trip to Maine – in addition to all the usual indignities (delays, bad/nonexistent food & water, rude folks, veal-calf seating, the constant marketing barrage, etc…) – some dirtbag stole my old, beat-up, been-everywhere-with-me Pentax Optio digital camera from my checked duffle bag.

It’s even possible that as I shuffled away from the security checkpoint in that semi-humiliated shoeless state every air traveler knows – holding my pants up because I was asked to remove my all-plastic belt – somebody was rifling my “secure” luggage.

(That I paid extra to have my luggage lost and stolen only adds to my extreme sense of customer satisfaction and delight.)

That’s why you won’t be seeing any nostalgia-inducing photographs of handsomely bronzed smallmouth bass, Maine’s hugely appealing sky/cloud/lakescapes, blueberry pies, Little M, gut-busting shore lunches, or Grand Laker canoes.

Or much of anything else.

It’s also why this took a little longer than usual to write.

In simple terms, the travel portions of this trip did not fill my heart with joy, and while a little emotion isn’t bad writer fuel, too much anger leaves your work feeling leaden and accusatory.

Oddly, the Chris Raine experienced the same loss on a recent trip to Colorado Springs – right down to losing almost exactly the same camera.

Which leads us to Today’s Travel Thought:

Modern air travel may be expensive and humiliating, but at least your belongings aren’t safe.

I’m still working on a trip wrapup, but the reality of our hyper-connected work world is that eight largely unconnected days in Maine left me perilously behind in the work department.

In other words, I’m still catching up.

And what you’re reading isn’t a trip report.

It’s more a promise: Once I become Absolute Ruler of the Universe, there will be purges.

Starting with US Airways.

See you at the computer, Tom Chandler.

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